The problem companies will have with this concept is the same one they have with iTunes type purchases.
Media companies WANT you to buy a package deal. They NEED you to buy a package deal. They don't want you to buy a single song. They want you to buy the whole CD. Better yet, the boxed set!
The more granularity you have in your selections, the less powerful their pitches become and the more focus they have to put into pushing all their shows/songs to be hits rather than 'passable filler between the two hits'.
Pay only for what you use might be a big hit for the customer, but it's a huge loss for the retailer. They'll never support such a plan, not while the world is run with money.
Actually I was making a joke, which must have been better disguised then I thought given I was moded interesting.
Is it just me or does anyone else immediately think of this poster whenever someone spouts off how a company needs to follow this or that way of "thinking" to succeed?
I believe that's actually XOR, thank you.
Tyranny of OR would basicly be the tyranny of apathy, "Yeah, you could have either one, I don't care, as long as you have atleast one."
I can't dl it in Steam since I already have the full version and Steam isn't listing it in the avaliable games, however from other people's statements the Demo is basicly a few of the first levels and a bit of Ravenhome. No new content.
I understand people wanting to 'defend' guns and gun ownership.
But please, try to avoid the old argument "well other things can be used to commit crimes too!"
If you can't figure out the "which one of these things doesn't belong" quality guns have in relation to your laundry list, then I really think the world would be better off without you owning a gun. Responsible gun owners understand they are handling tools whose original intended purpose is to kill things and act accordingly.
Why pay $50 and then $15/month when you can shell out $50 and play HL2 and have just as good of a time?
Because when you want to play the next HL2 (whatever game that will be) next month, it's another $50 where WoW will be only $15?
Because once you've beat HL2, that's the end of the story, but next year this time WoW will still be adding onto their story?
Because I already bought HL2 and beat it and this IS the next HL2 in my list?
Because spending a month playing WoW actually leaves me with something I can consider an accomplishment (my character) that others can see instead of just another game on the shelf and a couple of save games clogging up my hard drive?
You are missing the point as well. The question shouldn't be "why should I do this rather than this" it should be "why should I expect this to be something else, when it patently isn't" or "why should I expect this to be something else when I enjoy it the way it is now?"
I beat HL2 in the course of two weeks, it would have been one had I not stopped to use the G-gun on every loose piece of trash and burnt out car I could find.
I beat Dues Ex 2 in the course of a week. It would have been even less if I hadn't been telling myself "this can't be all there is, maybe they hid something over here".
I beat most single player FPS games in far less than a month. I beat most RTS games in far less than a month. The only games out there that can even CLAIM to hold me longer than a month are RPGs and they normally don't take that much time except that I'm spending all my time doing EVERY quest and looking for EVERY easter egg because I know that when I put it down I won't pick it up for another year.
If you are a 'normal folk' and can't even spend an hour a day playing games, then frankly you might be normal but you aren't a normal game player. I might or might not be able to spend an hour a day playing a game, but I most certainly have time during the weekends.
If you can't put 30 hours into a game in a 30 month day, then you really don't need to pretend you are a gamer and really don't need to worry about MMO anything.
I am not a hard-core gamer, I have a life outside computers, I have a job that frequently goes well over 8 hours a day. But you don't have to be a hard-core gamer to get a value out of an MMO you simply have to actually PLAY games.
If you can't do that it's much like the little boy who complains that he can't afford that new sports car on his $5 a month allowance. Who CARES, you can't drive it anyway.
While I like the concept, I'd have to remind you that the biggest cost in hosting an MMO isn't the bandwidth but the CPU time.
A "Server" for a game is more than likely not going to be one server, it's going to be a farm of 8-10 servers + a master server and maybe a database server. A game like WoW has maybe 20? "Servers" for their game. That comes down to somewhere in the area of 200 servers to run just for one game.
Lets say that you host 50 games, with the same ball-park figures. That's close to 10,000 servers. Ten thousand that you have to monitor and maintain. The sort of facilities you'd have to have to maintain that number of servers would be expensive enough that unless they are packing enough people into the games that you can't actually play, $1 a month isn't even going to come close to covering the costs. Much less giving the developers or the hosters any room for profit.
People need to wake up and join the rest of us in the 2000's. Expecting a company to host servers for a game on their own dime might have been something that flew before the bubble burst, but you'd have to be an absolute fool to think that business model is anything but a slow death today.
Realize that you are paying for a service and that if you compared the money you were spending on a subscription to the other things you could buy with it, it's not that bad a deal.
And to those people out there who want to complain "They shouldn't charge me for the game, if they are going to charge me to play" quit being cheapskates looking for a free handout. Developing and publishing a game costs money too. It's not as if most MMO's don't give a free trial period or as if the amount of time you get out of that period is shorter than how long you'd normally be playing a non-MMO game at the same price before putting it on the shelf and letting it collect dust.
I can't reach the post on their boards, however the blurp indicates Dec 04 to Jan 05, only one month not a year. Basicly, they are offering the same free trial period almost every other MMORPG offers these days, assuming you join today. After today then the offer keeps getting worse.
Anarchy Online offers free trial period to new users! They are definately not going subscription free, even new users will need to pay at the end of the free period.
The reason Microsoft is powerful is that it has what can be considered a monopoly on the only general use, general purpose OS.
Porting applications over to Window's can only DECREASE that monopoly.
There are reasons people don't migrate to Linux, despite the costs. And one of those reasons is that not everyone wants to learn a whole new way of doing things because everything in Linux is different from Windows.
One way of solving this is figuring ways to let Window's apps work in Linux. And this is useful for those of us who are ALREADY comfortable with Linux. However, this does diddly squat for people who aren't that comfortable with Linux. Where is the advantage, to changing if your applications already work well in Windows and migrating means they might not work and that you'll need to take time out in learning new ways of doing things?
The other way of solving this is ensuring that YOUR apps work just as well in Windows as they do in Linux. Once you do this, then you open the avenue of people migrating to your APPLICATIONS first, because they've gotten tired of some idiosyncrasy in their MS product or are just cheap (or heck, maybe because yours is BETTER). Once they are familiar with your products, it's far less scary to move to Linux, since it means that they no longer have to learn EVERYTHING new.
On top of that, if your applications work in Windows, you now are able to tap into the pool of Windows Developers out there that want to improve the product they are using and who might otherwise not even have given FOSS a second look. The more comfortable those people become with writing cross-platform code, the more likely they are to write their own projects in the same manner, and the more likely that their project will not be Windows only.
When the majority of apps that people use are ones that work on either platform, THEN and ONLY then will the average user consider the choice between Linux and Windows to be something they feel comfortable in actually deciding instead of "Well, Linux sure sounds nice but I'd never be able to do anything with it."
Unfortunatly, your arguement, while at face value appears relavant, is completely wrong.
Yes. The 'big' dungeons are instanced. However the majority of the 'uber' stuff you can get in them is bind on pick-up. Meaning it can not be traded, only destroyed (either manually or by selling to an NPC vendor.)
The items which CAN be sold, traded, or just plain given away, are typically OUTSIDE those dungeons or are assembled from resources which can and are already being camped. So you still have a problem with being able to compete with bots or jackasses to get the materials you need to make your own stuff.
I'm interested in seeing how this plays out. I've been on the fence with Blizzard (didn't exactlly like their use of DMCA even through I could see the logic of their case against the B.net clone) but having played WoW this last week, I've been nothing but impressed by their product.
For those of you who don't know, WoW comes with the ability to customize your UI, adding, changing and removing functionality through a combination of XML and Lua scripting. They've already said that if you can do it with what they've opened up to you fromt here, it's ok to do. They'll take the responsibility to correct exploits if a way to abuse something is found. That, combined with their strong "out of the gates" oposition to botting and RL selling seems (IMO) to be the perfect combination of freedom (allowing legitimate enhancement of the game through the customization) while not allowing exploiters to take over the game to farm out item.
I'm really interested in seeing what the landscape is like a year from now.
I realize people like to think of the 'fuzz' as a bunch of coffee swilling doughnut eating imbeciles. However do you really think it would be THAT hard for a properly trained professional to 'root' a liniux box in a way that you'd never notice?
C'mon. Whatever OS you run, unless they are sending the uni's over with the equivalent of an AOL CD, they'll be able to get their hooks into.
Yes, however I don't believe this book contains any immortal immoral supermen who bed every women (and most of the men) in the galaxy while not so secretly lusting after their mother. Who happens to be a super genius that developed the first AI/machine that travels to other universes/star ship and a crack sharp shooter to boot. Neither of them will be detailing their ideas on how the universe should work through 10 page monolouges complaining about the idiocy of the comman man.
To me, the question isn't so much the game'ss lasting power as it is the game's return on investment.
In the first month, do I feel like the game was worth the originial cost of buying it? Given most of the non-MMOG I get don't last even a month the first go around, it isn't hard to justify WoW. From the descriptions it'd definately pass muster here. Hell, Deus Ex 2 made it past the bar, you'd have to really try hard to loss.
After the first month, do I feel like I'm still getting enough out of the game to warrent the cost of the subscription? If I do, I pay and play. If I don't, I drop it.
It really isn't any more complicated than that to me, a MMOG isn't a carreer. You shouldn't be looking for something that you'll still be playing in the nursing home.
Yeah, sometimes you'll get into situations where you'll have friends in the game that you don't want to lose and feel like you can't quit the game because of that. But you know, that's what email and IM is for. Get a free message board hosted off one of the big sites and keep in touch with them there.
The fun part of CS is that if you are on a good server with good players, you get to think tacticly and strategicly instead of just going in guns a'blazing.
The fun part of DM is that if you are on a good server with good players, you can go in gun a'blazing and not have to think about tactics or strategy.
Both are good in moderate quality doses. But both will also suck if the people you play with or the server itself sucks.
Here is a related topic which occurs regularly in the fansub circles of Anime.
A well loved anime, KOR, was not licensed for distribution in America. As a result, a fan group subtitled and released the entire series for free, using the arguement that since it wasn't licensed for sale in America, they weren't hurting anyone. This was back in the good old dual vcr and tape days. Because this was a popular anime, pretty much anyone who wanted to could get a copy of the fansubs for the price of the tapes and the time to copy them.
A few years later, a company was approached by the fans of this series, asking them to purchase the rights to distribute it in America. The company declined at first, citing the fact that since the fansubs of the anime were so prevalent, no one would have any reason to buy them. Eventually, in this case, a happy ending came about when the fans pre-ordered enough copies to make it finiacially viable to actually do the project.
However, just because this one ended in a happy note, does'nt meant they all do. The fact of the matter is, most of the time fansubers, abandonware sites, and other gray area copyright violators who aren't stealing out of a desire to not pay but out of a lack of any other avenue to get the product, end up hurting themselves in the end.
Typically what happens is that instead of reviving the product, they hammer the last nail into the coffin by removing ANY hope of the company seeing any finiacial viablity out of bringing the product back on their own.
On the other hand, damn it sure would be nice if companies couldn't horde these things as long as they do now.
Slashdot Mirror
The key part of the statement is the contradiction: ISN'T. As in, "is not".
The problem companies will have with this concept is the same one they have with iTunes type purchases.
Media companies WANT you to buy a package deal. They NEED you to buy a package deal. They don't want you to buy a single song. They want you to buy the whole CD. Better yet, the boxed set!
The more granularity you have in your selections, the less powerful their pitches become and the more focus they have to put into pushing all their shows/songs to be hits rather than 'passable filler between the two hits'.
Pay only for what you use might be a big hit for the customer, but it's a huge loss for the retailer. They'll never support such a plan, not while the world is run with money.
But would that make it a Quantum Leap? ^_^
Ok, how else do you plan on getting a League of Super Friends formed? Think people, THINK!
In reality, I would hope whatever plan they would use would break it into small enough pieces that the majority would burn up in the atmosphere.
Actually I was making a joke, which must have been better disguised then I thought given I was moded interesting. Is it just me or does anyone else immediately think of this poster whenever someone spouts off how a company needs to follow this or that way of "thinking" to succeed?
I believe that's actually XOR, thank you. Tyranny of OR would basicly be the tyranny of apathy, "Yeah, you could have either one, I don't care, as long as you have atleast one."
I can't dl it in Steam since I already have the full version and Steam isn't listing it in the avaliable games, however from other people's statements the Demo is basicly a few of the first levels and a bit of Ravenhome. No new content.
I haven't seen a queue since I bought WoW about two weeks ago.
Those have substantial non-infringing use. :-P
I understand people wanting to 'defend' guns and gun ownership.
But please, try to avoid the old argument "well other things can be used to commit crimes too!"
If you can't figure out the "which one of these things doesn't belong" quality guns have in relation to your laundry list, then I really think the world would be better off without you owning a gun. Responsible gun owners understand they are handling tools whose original intended purpose is to kill things and act accordingly.
- Because when you want to play the next HL2 (whatever game that will be) next month, it's another $50 where WoW will be only $15?
- Because once you've beat HL2, that's the end of the story, but next year this time WoW will still be adding onto their story?
- Because I already bought HL2 and beat it and this IS the next HL2 in my list?
- Because spending a month playing WoW actually leaves me with something I can consider an accomplishment (my character) that others can see instead of just another game on the shelf and a couple of save games clogging up my hard drive?
You are missing the point as well. The question shouldn't be "why should I do this rather than this" it should be "why should I expect this to be something else, when it patently isn't" or "why should I expect this to be something else when I enjoy it the way it is now?"I beat HL2 in the course of two weeks, it would have been one had I not stopped to use the G-gun on every loose piece of trash and burnt out car I could find.
I beat Dues Ex 2 in the course of a week. It would have been even less if I hadn't been telling myself "this can't be all there is, maybe they hid something over here".
I beat most single player FPS games in far less than a month. I beat most RTS games in far less than a month. The only games out there that can even CLAIM to hold me longer than a month are RPGs and they normally don't take that much time except that I'm spending all my time doing EVERY quest and looking for EVERY easter egg because I know that when I put it down I won't pick it up for another year.
If you are a 'normal folk' and can't even spend an hour a day playing games, then frankly you might be normal but you aren't a normal game player. I might or might not be able to spend an hour a day playing a game, but I most certainly have time during the weekends.
If you can't put 30 hours into a game in a 30 month day, then you really don't need to pretend you are a gamer and really don't need to worry about MMO anything.
I am not a hard-core gamer, I have a life outside computers, I have a job that frequently goes well over 8 hours a day. But you don't have to be a hard-core gamer to get a value out of an MMO you simply have to actually PLAY games.
If you can't do that it's much like the little boy who complains that he can't afford that new sports car on his $5 a month allowance. Who CARES, you can't drive it anyway.
While I like the concept, I'd have to remind you that the biggest cost in hosting an MMO isn't the bandwidth but the CPU time.
A "Server" for a game is more than likely not going to be one server, it's going to be a farm of 8-10 servers + a master server and maybe a database server. A game like WoW has maybe 20? "Servers" for their game. That comes down to somewhere in the area of 200 servers to run just for one game.
Lets say that you host 50 games, with the same ball-park figures. That's close to 10,000 servers. Ten thousand that you have to monitor and maintain. The sort of facilities you'd have to have to maintain that number of servers would be expensive enough that unless they are packing enough people into the games that you can't actually play, $1 a month isn't even going to come close to covering the costs. Much less giving the developers or the hosters any room for profit.
People need to wake up and join the rest of us in the 2000's. Expecting a company to host servers for a game on their own dime might have been something that flew before the bubble burst, but you'd have to be an absolute fool to think that business model is anything but a slow death today.
Realize that you are paying for a service and that if you compared the money you were spending on a subscription to the other things you could buy with it, it's not that bad a deal.
And to those people out there who want to complain "They shouldn't charge me for the game, if they are going to charge me to play" quit being cheapskates looking for a free handout. Developing and publishing a game costs money too. It's not as if most MMO's don't give a free trial period or as if the amount of time you get out of that period is shorter than how long you'd normally be playing a non-MMO game at the same price before putting it on the shelf and letting it collect dust.
I can't reach the post on their boards, however the blurp indicates Dec 04 to Jan 05, only one month not a year. Basicly, they are offering the same free trial period almost every other MMORPG offers these days, assuming you join today. After today then the offer keeps getting worse.
Anarchy Online offers free trial period to new users! They are definately not going subscription free, even new users will need to pay at the end of the free period.
The reason Microsoft is powerful is that it has what can be considered a monopoly on the only general use, general purpose OS.
Porting applications over to Window's can only DECREASE that monopoly.
There are reasons people don't migrate to Linux, despite the costs. And one of those reasons is that not everyone wants to learn a whole new way of doing things because everything in Linux is different from Windows.
One way of solving this is figuring ways to let Window's apps work in Linux. And this is useful for those of us who are ALREADY comfortable with Linux. However, this does diddly squat for people who aren't that comfortable with Linux. Where is the advantage, to changing if your applications already work well in Windows and migrating means they might not work and that you'll need to take time out in learning new ways of doing things?
The other way of solving this is ensuring that YOUR apps work just as well in Windows as they do in Linux. Once you do this, then you open the avenue of people migrating to your APPLICATIONS first, because they've gotten tired of some idiosyncrasy in their MS product or are just cheap (or heck, maybe because yours is BETTER). Once they are familiar with your products, it's far less scary to move to Linux, since it means that they no longer have to learn EVERYTHING new.
On top of that, if your applications work in Windows, you now are able to tap into the pool of Windows Developers out there that want to improve the product they are using and who might otherwise not even have given FOSS a second look. The more comfortable those people become with writing cross-platform code, the more likely they are to write their own projects in the same manner, and the more likely that their project will not be Windows only.
When the majority of apps that people use are ones that work on either platform, THEN and ONLY then will the average user consider the choice between Linux and Windows to be something they feel comfortable in actually deciding instead of "Well, Linux sure sounds nice but I'd never be able to do anything with it."
Unfortunatly, your arguement, while at face value appears relavant, is completely wrong.
Yes. The 'big' dungeons are instanced. However the majority of the 'uber' stuff you can get in them is bind on pick-up. Meaning it can not be traded, only destroyed (either manually or by selling to an NPC vendor.)
The items which CAN be sold, traded, or just plain given away, are typically OUTSIDE those dungeons or are assembled from resources which can and are already being camped. So you still have a problem with being able to compete with bots or jackasses to get the materials you need to make your own stuff.
I'm interested in seeing how this plays out. I've been on the fence with Blizzard (didn't exactlly like their use of DMCA even through I could see the logic of their case against the B.net clone) but having played WoW this last week, I've been nothing but impressed by their product.
For those of you who don't know, WoW comes with the ability to customize your UI, adding, changing and removing functionality through a combination of XML and Lua scripting. They've already said that if you can do it with what they've opened up to you fromt here, it's ok to do. They'll take the responsibility to correct exploits if a way to abuse something is found. That, combined with their strong "out of the gates" oposition to botting and RL selling seems (IMO) to be the perfect combination of freedom (allowing legitimate enhancement of the game through the customization) while not allowing exploiters to take over the game to farm out item.
I'm really interested in seeing what the landscape is like a year from now.
I realize people like to think of the 'fuzz' as a bunch of coffee swilling doughnut eating imbeciles. However do you really think it would be THAT hard for a properly trained professional to 'root' a liniux box in a way that you'd never notice?
C'mon. Whatever OS you run, unless they are sending the uni's over with the equivalent of an AOL CD, they'll be able to get their hooks into.
Yes, however I don't believe this book contains any immortal immoral supermen who bed every women (and most of the men) in the galaxy while not so secretly lusting after their mother. Who happens to be a super genius that developed the first AI/machine that travels to other universes/star ship and a crack sharp shooter to boot. Neither of them will be detailing their ideas on how the universe should work through 10 page monolouges complaining about the idiocy of the comman man.
But perhaps I'm wrong.
Yes, my poor poor doctor. I hear he lives in a cardboard box now.....
To me, the question isn't so much the game'ss lasting power as it is the game's return on investment.
In the first month, do I feel like the game was worth the originial cost of buying it? Given most of the non-MMOG I get don't last even a month the first go around, it isn't hard to justify WoW. From the descriptions it'd definately pass muster here. Hell, Deus Ex 2 made it past the bar, you'd have to really try hard to loss.
After the first month, do I feel like I'm still getting enough out of the game to warrent the cost of the subscription? If I do, I pay and play. If I don't, I drop it.
It really isn't any more complicated than that to me, a MMOG isn't a carreer. You shouldn't be looking for something that you'll still be playing in the nursing home.
Yeah, sometimes you'll get into situations where you'll have friends in the game that you don't want to lose and feel like you can't quit the game because of that. But you know, that's what email and IM is for. Get a free message board hosted off one of the big sites and keep in touch with them there.
The fun part of CS is that if you are on a good server with good players, you get to think tacticly and strategicly instead of just going in guns a'blazing. The fun part of DM is that if you are on a good server with good players, you can go in gun a'blazing and not have to think about tactics or strategy. Both are good in moderate quality doses. But both will also suck if the people you play with or the server itself sucks.
Here is a related topic which occurs regularly in the fansub circles of Anime.
A well loved anime, KOR, was not licensed for distribution in America. As a result, a fan group subtitled and released the entire series for free, using the arguement that since it wasn't licensed for sale in America, they weren't hurting anyone. This was back in the good old dual vcr and tape days. Because this was a popular anime, pretty much anyone who wanted to could get a copy of the fansubs for the price of the tapes and the time to copy them.
A few years later, a company was approached by the fans of this series, asking them to purchase the rights to distribute it in America. The company declined at first, citing the fact that since the fansubs of the anime were so prevalent, no one would have any reason to buy them. Eventually, in this case, a happy ending came about when the fans pre-ordered enough copies to make it finiacially viable to actually do the project.
However, just because this one ended in a happy note, does'nt meant they all do. The fact of the matter is, most of the time fansubers, abandonware sites, and other gray area copyright violators who aren't stealing out of a desire to not pay but out of a lack of any other avenue to get the product, end up hurting themselves in the end.
Typically what happens is that instead of reviving the product, they hammer the last nail into the coffin by removing ANY hope of the company seeing any finiacial viablity out of bringing the product back on their own.
On the other hand, damn it sure would be nice if companies couldn't horde these things as long as they do now.
Since they didn't wait till HL2 to deploy it, does that mean you really are a Sucker, or just that it really isn't a that bad?
No wait.... let me come to my own conclusion on that...
*happy Steam user since it was first introduced over a year ago*